Offseason work under a new coaching staff has helped Washington lead the majors in runs.
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CJ Abrams has taken batting practice alongside Jacob Young hundreds of times. He knows his teammate’s strengths and weaknesses better than just about anyone else. So this season, when Young started hitting the ball farther and harder than ever before, Abrams immediately took notice.
“I didn’t know,” Abrams said when asked if he knew Young had that in him. “That’s been fun to watch.”
At first, the newfound power wasn’t translating to games. But that may be changing: Over his past 15 games entering Friday, Young has four home runs, just four strikeouts and an .831 OPS. The Washington Nationals center fielder has gone deep six times through his first 49 games after hitting five homers in 303 big league games before this year.
Young is part of a Washington offense that is outperforming expectations. After four straight years of below-average production, the group is now among the leaders in multiple categories. Through 51 games, the Nationals have scored an MLB-leading 280 runs, a mark that took them 68 games to reach last year.
While the pitching staff has been unreliable at best — the Nationals at one point led the majors in runs allowed — the hitters have helped propel them to a 25-26 record, their best through the first 51 games since 2018.
Washington has made the jump without making any major additions to its lineup. Instead, the new coaching staff has focused on tapping into the potential of the players that were already in the system.
On the first day of spring training, new manager Blake Butera discussed the external and internal perceptions of the Nationals. The players were sick, Butera said, of hearing about the rebuild and were motivated to prove the outside world wrong.
To do that, they had to put in the work, and the new coaching staff had to get buy-in from players, especially from the more established ones, to move away from the things they’ve done in the past. Abrams, Butera said, was one of the first to jump on board. That set the tone for the rest of the players to follow his lead.
“It creates a really cool culture where everyone else is also willing to try some of these things and more open to doing so because they see the person to their left and to their right also doing it,” Butera said.
The changes for Abrams included simplifying things in the box. He’s putting his front foot down earlier and has made his swing more compact while limiting head movement. He’s hitting .297 with 10 home runs, and his .924 OPS is his highest over any 50-game stretch of his career.
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“You have to be willing to put the work in and love the process,” Abrams said. “The results are what they are, you can’t control them. But what you can control is the work you put in every day, and the results will come.”
Young’s work began before the new coaching staff was in place. Frustrated with how he performed in his two full major league seasons in 2024 and 2025, he took a trip to Driveline, the renowned performance facility in Kent, Washington. There, he worked on his bat path and increased his bat speed by using a trio of weighted bats. He rotated through all three during every session, the lighter bats increasing his hand speed and the heavier bats helping him gain strength.
When the new staff was hired, the coaches gave Young a plan for the rest of the offseason to build on what he learned at Driveline. It took time for the changes to feel natural. Missing part of spring training with a right wrist contusion didn’t help either, but over the last few weeks, he said, things have started to click.
His average bat speed is 69.7 mph this season, up from 68.3 a year ago.
“I always believed I was a better hitter than I was showing in the big leagues,” he said. “I hit my whole life. Getting to the big leagues and struggling was really hard, but you know, just understanding why I was struggling was a big part of it.”
The Nationals also have been working on bat speed with José Tena, who has increased his average from 70.8 mph to 73.7. Like Young, he’s using a program that revolves around a combination of weighted bats. He’s also focused on adding strength, hitting the weight room every day this season after lifting four to five days a week in previous years.
“I’m feeling really good as of [late],” he said through an interpreter. “I’m having good contact with the ball, and even though sometimes it doesn’t go my way, I’m still satisfied with what I’m doing.”
It’s not just the individual adjustments, either. The Nationals also have their hitters doing homework on opposing pitchers and are committed to their pregame work. That may be part of the reason their walk rate (9.4 percent) is their highest as a team since 2018.
The Nationals knew going into the season what the outside world thought of them. But they have adopted that underdog mentality, and they’re determined to prove them wrong.
“This is the best prepared group we have going into games, going into individual at-bats,” Butera said. “I think this is a really good group of hitters that I’m happy is getting to display some of their talents.”
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